ChicagoSportsBlogs : Non Compete

I have to warn everyone here -- I'm geeking out a bit on this post. Bear with me.

Yesterday, the White Sox were selling tickets to the ALCS. It is a bit premature, but I'm guessing the sports gods understand logistics well enough not to jinx us for this act of hubris. My entire lunch break was dedicated to getting Sox tickets. I felt good about the process that TicketMaster has setup to sell tickets online. I was very familiar with it from past experiences trying to get Cubs tickets or even tickets for this year's Sox home opener. There are tricks you can use to game the system. At least, there were tricks to game the system. No longer are you able to keep multiple browser windows open to increase your chances of getting tickets. You see, they must be queuing HTTP Requests. Then they just linearly go through the queue and refresh the hold page to replace it with the ticket buying interface when your session is selected. So in the old days, the entire IT department would open up like 100 browser sessions and just minimize them enough to see the title change when the meta-refresh returned with success! It was a brilliant brute force attack that garnered many sets of tickets in years past. TicketMaster got hip to this. I'm sure the fact their proxy servers, web servers and database servers were all melting was the first clue that their architecture for selling popular event tickets SUCKED.

Fast forward to yesterday's problems. TicketMaster now can tell when you have multiple sessions open. How do they do this? Most likely with a persistent cookie and a reference counter that can tell you have more than one successful ticket-buying window open. Craptacular! This meant I had to resort to a new method of increasing my place in the queues. I had to run one instance of IE and one instance of Firefox on 2 different machines. Yet, even with this slight advantage -- TicketMaster couldn't handle the load. Proxy errors corrupted the first 3 sessions I had established, right at 12pm CST. This was a nightmare. As a result of these proxy crashes, my sessions got dumped out of the line and I had to start all over. Needless to say, 45 minutes had passed and yours truly was without tickets to the ALCS. I'm sorry to see that I wasn't the only one having problems with the idiots at TicketMaster.

There are still a number of problems with the new “fair” TicketMaster site. I'm not going to list them here because it's a waste of all of our time. They don't care. They sell all the tickets regardless if it's a ticket broker in a rented office space with 100 computers and a bunch of college students working the terminals, or me on my lunch break trying to get 2 stupid tickets to see the White Sox. $100 a ticket face value has now gone up to $420 on average on StubHub.

OK -- you twisted my arm, I'll talk about the specific problems. First, just because the web servers don't melt doesn't mean that there weren't any problems. I am happy that the site could handle over 100,00 requests. That's the easy part. I'm also happy it probably handled 50,000 concurrent requests a second. That stuff doesn't matter. The needless HTTP keep-alive tactic causes unnecessary stress on the network and both web-servers and app-servers they might be running. You're trying to maintain state in a stateless world. As much as I love the web, this isn't the best way to handle this type of transaction. The initial bottleneck was the network (this is my guess). The majority of the error pages people here got were proxy server issues. The proxies must have melted. As a result, we got kicked out of successful rooms when the page refreshed. Secondly, that “Please Wait“ page seemed to always be stuck at 15 minutes. Occasionally it would go down to 8 or 9 minutes, and once it actually hit 1 minute. I've got to wonder if they are distributing my place in line to the least loaded back-end server and that's why the timer always bumps back up. If the dispatcher isn't coordinated in the cluster -- then it basically becomes every man for himself. Talk about a great design pattern...Anyways. Enough.

Maybe the White Sox should do what the Cubs did and start their own ticket broker service to cut TicketMaster out of this middle-man role. If the White Sox are listening, I'd build you a better way to handle ticket sales and keep more of that cash in the organization's pockets instead of the crooks that are colluding with TicketMaster to keep the regular Joes out of the ballpark. Yea, demand is nice. But this is an opportunity for the White Sox organization to grow it's fan base. It should take control of this matter for the World Series and make sure there is an even distro of tickets. But I'm getting way ahead of myself....

Good luck today against the BoSox Freddie. Close the deal.